How to Get Started on Google+

What Businesses Need to Know About Google+

#6: 11 Ways for Businesses to Utilize Google+
Although Google+ has asked businesses to hold off on creating business profiles, you can still use Google+ for business networking from your personal account on Google+. Aaron Lee shares 11 ways for you to use Google+ today on the iStrategy Blog.

#8: Google+ Starting to Impact Search
Does your business have a website? Have a look at how Google+ mentions will impact your listings on Google search results. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing explains how this affects businesses.

Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too.

For you and me, this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face

Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.

Maybe you’re watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Angry Birds). We’ll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

Direct Connect works for a limited number of pages today (like +Google, +Pepsi, and +Toyota), but many more are coming. In the meantime, organizations can learn more about Direct Connect in our Help Center.

A lot of people are probably wondering, “My friends and family are all on Facebook, so why should I be joining Google+?”

The answer is really Google itself. There’s a good chance that you use at least one Google product, at least their search, if not Gmail or Google Reader. I use Blogger.com, Android and Google Maps. There is a whole slew of Google products that you’ve probably touched in some way or another.

Google+ is intended to be the amalgamation of all of those products into one product that ties people together across all of Google.

If you click the Share button, you can update Google+ right from within Gmail without ever having to leave Gmail.

the fact is that Google+ is integrated into it, so they don’t really need (like Facebook needs) pull mechanisms that get you back in. At least in its early days, you had Facebook constantly emailing you every time something happened.

On many of the articles that get returned on Google, I see little icons of my friends and faces of my friends that have also +1-ed those articles before. So they’re already bringing that social experience into their existing products. Even into their flagship product, search. They’re already starting to find ways to bring Google+ into that.

How does the etiquette on Google+ vary, if at all, from the other networks? What’s been your experience?

Jesse: It’s a slightly different network with slightly different technology, so it is going to have a slightly different etiquette.

right now on Google+, you can tag other people, which you can kind of do on Facebook. But when you tag people on Google+, it is a little more in your face in many ways because of that notification bar that follows you around. You have to be a little more careful when you tag someone on Google+ versus elsewhere because there’s a good chance they’re going to see that tag, and tags can end up getting annoying if you’re doing it too much.

Because Google+ has a lot of different granular privacy controls, I’ve found, for me, that a lot of people do not get email notifications, except if they’ve been @tagged. And I’ve found that when you’re having a discussion, it seems to me as though @tagging the person in particular in a thread seems to be the going etiquette. You @tag the person you’re referring to and not just type in their first name. Have you found that to be the case?

As a result, I think mobile is potentially the future of Google+. I think that’s where most people will end up using it in the future if they’re not already.

Even if your content isn’t the first result on Google, I predict that if your content has a lot of people +1-ing it who are in a person’s Circles, there’s a good chance that your content will still be noticed. So it has a huge effect, I think.

Google has tracked some of that already. Right now, if you’re logged into Google via Gmail or any other Google product, it by default keeps you logged in when you’re searching.

what kind of impact do you think Google+ and +1 are likely to have on search results?

Jesse: Right now, when you do a search and you’ve enabled Google+, you’ll see different search results. If you have more people you’ve Circled, you’re more likely to see content from them than if you haven’t Circled many people.

The iPad is a different story—they need to update their tablet experience and I don’t think they’ve put much focus on that yet.

When you look at it, mobile is a very social experience—taking pictures and archiving the things that are happening around you, your location, and stuff like that. That’s all very interesting to your friends

t doesn’t come by default with Android yet, but it’s pretty easy to download at the moment, and it integrates really well with the Android experience. Android, as an operating system, is the most widely used operating system of smartphones right now. As a result, it has the potential to be huge on mobile.

re there apps for Google+?

Google+ just launched an API—a platform for building those apps. It’s very limited at the moment in what you can and can’t do. It has rate limits (the amount of times you can query the Google APIs to access) applied to it that are very strict, so you’re not going to see many apps right out of the gate.

The focus right now is on integrating into third-party websites, integrating into browser plugins, and stuff like that, so you’re not going to see apps that integrate right on top of Google+ like you’ve seen with FarmVille on Facebook and other things that happen on Facebook.com.

Again, the problem right now is API rate limits. That may inhibit some of those types of apps from working with Google+.

Do you see somehow Google Analytics and Google+ having some sort of marriage down the road that might be useful for the consumer or the business or the marketer?

I think there’s a huge future for Google Analytics and Google+. Google Analytics has already started integrating social components into the Analytics software.

I don’t doubt that they probably will include Google+ with those stats in some form in the future.

Google hasn’t hinted at any of this, so it’s hard to say one way or the other, but there’s a very good chance, I think, you’ll see Google+ in Google Analytics.

If you have a +1 button on your website or you’ve incorporated that into different websites, it will include that data in there already. That is part of Google+, so you’re right, they actually are including that already in some of the Google Analytics. I anticipate that to be expanded even further in the future.

Google’s search results are undergoing their most radical transformation ever, as a new “Search Plus Your World” format begins rolling out today. It finds both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set of listings

allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.

It might be similar to some of the concerns that came up recently with Facebook Timeline. It’s not that the material Timeline lists wasn’t out there before. But by organizing it, forgotten things are brought back up, as this New York Times article explained well.

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears.

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful,” said Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, when I talked with him about the new features.

Private Content In Your Web Results

To summarize, personalized results include:

Listings from the web

Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior

Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections

Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)

Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line is the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web.

real life example of how personalized search is working for Singhal. He shared this photo of his dog, Chikoo, on Google+ in a limited manner, rather than with the entire world. The other photos of the dog that you can see, including one from his wife, Shilpa, were also privately shared.

Before today’s change, a Google search wouldn’t have found any of these photos when Singhal, his wife or anyone he’s shared them with searched for “chikoo,” which is a fruit. That’s because since the photos were private, Google couldn’t see them.

Instead, if Singhal or others with access to these photos wanted to find them, they would have had to use the completely separate Google+ Search.

The new feature will also work to find Google+ posts that have been shared in a limited manner, or for Google Picasa photos shared privately.

Clicking on the “personal results” link (or “Personal” in the options under “More Search Tools” in the left-column) brings back pure personal results.

Slightly confusing, you can drill-down into the results to get what Google also calls “Personal Results,” which is a way to get just content from Google+ or Picasa. Remember this from above?

Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

Why are these others missing?

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

personalized results aren’t Google’s public results. They are results personalized just for the person viewing them. If private content has been shared with those people, that’s visible. If it hasn’t been, then it’s not.

Google’s really just making Google+ Search one of its Universal Search sources, in some ways.

other words, you can search on Google and find matches from Google News, Google Images, Google Video and other Google search services without having to go to them individually. Google+ Search is now another one of those integrated services.

Now Google’s going to give greater visibility to private information. Things that people may have forgotten sharing with others will begin to show up serendipitously through ordinary Google searches.

Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

Another issue is that it’s very easy with Google+ (as it is with Facebook and Twitter) for someone with access to private content to reshare it publicly. Someone searching on Google, then coming across an unexpected photo or post from a friend, might reshare it to the world.

The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection you’re using.

Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.

Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. It’s a false justification. Indeed, the move might make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers.

You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.

This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.

But geographic targeting — which can be really significant – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.

For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box,

You can see how for Ben Smith, a little picture of him appears next to the search suggestion for his name, which in turn is a link to his Google+ profile, if it were selected.

In other words, if you searched for a friend who had a common name, you should be shown your actual friend’s Google+ profile, rather than someone you don’t know.

In addition, the search results themselves will devote much more room to displaying material from a Google+ person (and actually have been doing so since November):

it’s a lot of room devoted to Google+ profiles

In fact, if the anti-trust critics need more ammunition, there’s the last component of what’s being rolled out today, suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow.

These will appear on the right-hand side of search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Below, what a search for “music” might show:

That’s nice promotion for Google+ (and it also underscores yet again why search marketers simply cannot ignore Google+). But there are still many more people on Twitter and Facebook versus Google Plus.

Google should be able to easily figure out what profiles on other social networks might be relevant to searches. That’s Google’s job as a search engine, if it’s going to make these type of recommendations. But only Google+ gets this type of treatment, and it doesn’t feel right.

Today, it became really clear how far-reaching Google’s ambitions for Google+ actually are. In fact, Google+ could change the entire way we use the Web — and drive millions of Web sites who depend on Google to change how they attract customers.

For instance, today when I search for “Las Vegas,” I get a bunch of hotel ads up top, followed by a visitor’s guide, Google Map info, and the official city of Las Vegas site.

But in the future, those search results will be populated with information from Google+. If one of my friends recently shared with me a bunch of pictures from a crazy bachelor party, I’ll see links to them. If another group of friends just got back from CES, I’ll see posts and photos of smartphones and TVs. And so on.

hat’s only the beginning. As Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch pointed out this morning, Google has a lot of other products that contain personally relevant information. Google Docs has documents, Gmail has contacts and calendar entries, Google Music has playlist information, and so on.

Forget SEO. Suddenly, the game of search engine optimization (SEO) totally changes. Instead of trying to figure out how to get sites to appear high up in organic search results, businesses will have to figure out how to attract real people to post information about them on Google+. That’s bad news for SEO companies who can’t change quickly, but great news for startups focused on social marketing

Google’s revenue mix tilts more toward first-party ads.

As Tom Foremski recently pointed out over at ZDNet, in 2010, revenue from Google’s third-party advertisers was growing faster than its revenue from ads on its own sites. In 2011, that trend suddenly changed. Foremski credits (or blames) algorithmic search changes like Panda, which guided more users toward major brand pages and less toward Google affiliate partners. Google keeps all the money from ads sold on its own sites, so this is great for Google’s business — but not so great for the affiliates. (My opinion: tough luck.) Putting more “personal” data from Google properties high up in search results means that affiliate sites will probably have an even harder time placing.

under the guise of launching a Facebook clone, Google has actually embarked on a major plan to improve search relevance AND shift its revenue mix to the much more profitable first-party ads. If Google can get away with this — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, unless regulators decide that it’s got a monopoly in search and has to be subject to special laws — it’s an amazing coup.

On the surface, this appears to be a desperate play by Google to make sure its social networking experiment, G+, gains more traction.

However, I don’t think Google is desperate at all—and this isn’t just about their social network. Google knows exactly what they’re doing with G+: I think they’re using it to unify their products, get people dependent on the Google Bar without even realizing it and, of course, change the way people find information in Search. And most importantly, all of this gives Google data.

What G+ solves for Google Products

That gives Google a tremendous advantage for business, entertainment and social life online

The only problem has been the lack of visual unification of Google products, and the stealing of page views, advertising revenue and time from rivals like Facebook. That’s where the Google Bar and G+ come in.

Now, when you’re logged in to Google, you’re using the Google Bar by default any time that you’re using a Google product. For example, here’s what it looks like when I’m in Google Docs:

But when G+ was released, not only could your main social network be easy to access via the Google Bar, you could conduct all of your business without leaving the Google ecosystem.

With G+, the new PageRank is something I like to call Google Profile Authority or GPA. Achieving a high GPA won’t come from building giant networks (circles) full of weak profiles. Also, building an enormous network of friends will most likely be full of people (some fake) that have irrelevant interests and they won’t come close to the 99.9% of other people outside your network that will be searching.

The best approach to GPA is to consider what the G+ changes will actually do.

In theory, it will provide more relevant search results that have been prescreened by trusted connections.

Your participation and GPA in G+ will influence some of the search results for other people.

Your participation will not affect the search results for the majority of people doing searches outside your network, with your GPA being the possible exception, assuming it has some impact on the algorithm.

Chrome OS was an experiment to see if users could survive—thrive even—in a browser-only environment. The experiment required that all of the tools you would need would be browser accessible. Google has been very busy creating and promoting those tools. If you have any doubt about that, take a quick glance at today’s list of Google products (they have been culling the list, but what’s left is still impressive):

G+ also solves Google’s very big problem of trust and authority for content that’s served in their SERPs. Before Google Profiles and their push for connecting authors with the content they’ve written, they had to rely solely on “low confidence” data to determine trust and authority and hope for the best.

Google is attempting to solve that problem with G+ by putting emphasis on Google Profile entities and how those profiles interact socially within the G+ framework. G+ provides Google the ability to not only better measure individual trust and authority, but also the ability to measure trust and authority for many people across large fragmented networks.

For example, if trusted and authoritative G+ users +1 an article that’s connected to a Google profile, the author’s profile should increase in trust and authority, and the content should perform better in the SERPs.

How the merging of G+ data into SERPs will impact SEO

some will come to the conclusion that they’ll be able to win the SERPs battle by building immense circles around multiple profiles. A lot of time will be wasted doing this. The problem is that Google has already thought of this.

What G+ solves for Google Search

Keeping those things in mind, here are my suggestions for approaching SEO in a G+ world.

It will be more important than ever to be positively connected to people and influencers within the industries you represent.

This is genuinely the first time that I can remember an announcement from Google that so drastically changes the actual look (and make-up) of the search results all at once and to the degree that so many people within the tech industry have sat up and said “this goes a bit too far”.

1. Will CTR drop through the floor even if you rank first as – for popular terms – this will be pushed far enough down the page that you may as well rank 3rd or 4th? And if this is the case what will this look like on mobile? Will natural results even feature?

2. A much bigger concern is what this will mean (assuming opinion shifts towards this being a positive release) and loads more people join the service and begin to search whilst logged in? What about all of that (not provided) keyword data?

Many marketers – and to a large degree Google – have put a great deal of emphasis on making their results more relevant not only for particular queries, but for individual audiences. This goes well beyond search only products into retargeting, adwords and adsense, and a number of other products out there and many marketers have obsessed with delivering the most relevant message at the right time – and I agree that there is value in that – but the problem with this is that when it is handled poorly, when campaigns are implemented poorly, when a brand retargets you over and over again for a product that perhaps once was but no longer is relevant to you, I worry that you can create an aversion to your brand.

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The Impact on Brands

What does a change this big mean for businesses that depend on their Google rank for traffic and sales?

Personalized results are the default when users are logged into their Google account, so it will be harder to determine your rankings. It’ll also be harder for your customers to find you, and for you to get traffic from the same ranking because more often than not, Google+ results will be appearing before public listings.

But the biggest problem is, they’re not always relevant. While the savvy surfers know to switch between personal and public, you can’t assume all of your potential customers are going to know the difference.

Two out of three top results, traditionally coveted for clicks, are filled with social mentions. And social mentions that have nothing to do with a web design company.

Google’s long been under fire for an algorithm that struggles to produce the most relevant results, and with Search+, it seems that they aren’t doing much to head in that direction. Yes, it does add more trust and authority to your results, but not relevance.

What Can Brands Do?

You know that you can’t have search without social, and Search+ reinforces it. Since Facebook and Twitter results aren’t aggregated into public search, it’s put an even bigger emphasis on not only creating a brand page on Google+, but being an active member. Sounds like Google’s plan all along.

You then have to get your Google+ brand page into as many influential people’s circles as possible. These people also have to be in many other circles if you have hopes of reaching people outside of your immediate network. This isn’t an easy feat.

But there’s more: Search+ essentially forces brands to use their Google+ pages much like their own website. That means brands should integrate their main keywords into Google+ posts to increase their relevance in important searches. But again, this must be done in a natural, non-spammy manner.

Finally, if guest blogging is a part of your SEO strategy, which it should be, you need to ensure that each site that publishes your content is using the rel="author" tag that leads back to your Google+ profile so you gain more clout and authority from Google.

Within the last 12 hours, Gizmodo has called Bing a better search engine than Google, and Dave Winer at Scripting News said he was sick of Google’s clutter and would switch to Bing if Microsoft promised not to muck it up.

We can also take this announcement and consider the changes to secure searching and the (not provided) data we now see in Google referrers. Remember, that little data point is gold. It tells you exactly how much of your Google traffic is actually logged in. If we consider the ongoing personalizations in the SERPs, we can better plan marketing activities around it.

et’s say your site is in the upper levels, around 20% (not provided). It makes a whole lot of sense to be focussed on the personalization trinity (behavioural, social graph and geo-localized) within your ongoing marketing programs.

“We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.“

It can’t be understated how personalization (behavioural, social and geo-local) will continue to change the search landscape in 2012. And we haven’t even gotten into the implications of these annotations as far as click-through goes. I’m sure there will be some eye-tracking reports out in short order though…

As most of us expected, Google is going to be putting a lot more emphasis on social and in particular, Google Plus. Most of the changes are aimed at bringing Plus more prominence and further integrating the social graph into search personalization.

From the post;

Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,

People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

want to point out an intricacy I have seen that is already bothering me about Search+

Hiding Local Results

Personalized results actually hide a lot of content. Take for example searching for “steakhouse NYC”. In the completely personalized, it actually helps if I want a recommendation from a friend:

But notice that the local results are gone. I don’t see those until I switch to the mixed or universal results:

In the above case, I want the local results, because it provides the best experience when I search for “steakhouse NYC”. I don’t just want the opinions of my connections. I want to see what my friends recommend WITHIN what you already have. But this is not the default.

The problem comes when when anyone outside the search world tries to use the new features! We know to switch it, but will my mom? Will my Dad?

Google has long tried to find ways to surface the best information, but “best” is a relative term. What is best for me in one SERP (steak) is personalization, while in another it is universal (longtail seo). It almost seems like Google is giving up trying to surface content across the board, and instead is letting us choose.

I appreciate that move, Google, and it was obvious you were heading in this direction. But I did not know that it was going to be so drastic. Honestly, I think it hurts the overall search experience. Local results are buried because of personalization as we see, I have to switch back and forth to see universal or personalized.

For being a company that apparently has a lot of data and is always talking about “intent”, this new search is not very good at figuring out intent